Kate Middleton’s Family Business Gets Mega Advertising With Old Ad Featuring Kate? [Opinion]

Kate Middleton had a tough time with the media when she first married into the royal family, as many accused her family of riding on the royal coattails for free advertising of their Party Pieces business. Carol Middleton recently posted a throwback picture of the Middleton’s family business showing a 7-year-old Kate Middleton in an advertisement that’s gone viral. This is a picture that will be seen around the globe.

Instead of this picture screaming free advertising for the Middleton’s Party Pieces business, it does the opposite. This photo offers a window into the very beginning of Carol’s business journey, long before any royal family member was involved. It shows a young Carol Middleton in a black and white photo with her children gathered around her. Kate, Pippa, and James Middleton are seen donning party hats.

The picture has a young Kate and Pippa blowing on those party noise makers with a curl of paper at the end that expands when you blow into them. This snapshot in time demonstrates Carol getting creative for advertising back in 1989 by gathering up her three kids and a few neighborhood kids to boot. Carol, the businesswoman and proud mom, is standing in the center of this happy group of kids, looking genuinely pleased herself.

It appears she handed them all party favors and hats so she would be surrounded by kids having fun in a party-like setting for a picture she could use on flyers for her business. Carol Middleton is celebrating 30 years in her Party Pieces business this year and part of that celebration was this picture of one of her first ads.

Kate Middleton’s mom started the business in 1987 after realizing there wasn’t much available for party goods in her area. She saw a need and went with it, stocking up her garden shed with the supplies she intended to sell. During the years it grew and her kids and husband became very much a part of the business.

Party Pieces was the brain child of Carol Middleton and she worked from a garden shed as her warehouse for supplies. While this picture has been shared, liked, tweeted and retweeted, as it makes its way around the globe, there’s no free advertising here to sell anything. What Carol Middleton is advertising, whether she knows it or not, is how wrong those people were to accuse the family of riding on royal’s coattails.

This picture is worth a thousand words and it is too bad folks didn’t see this during the time people were lambasting Kate’s family. You can appreciate the work this young mother in the picture did to raise her family. She has also posted a picture of a garden shed, which doubled as her warehouse. That picture offers up a snapshot of the roots of her business, and it’s easy to see that nothing was handed to Carol Middleton.

Kate Middleton à la Royal Photographic Society : REALLY ?? https://t.co/xqg4KX73NR #KateMiddleton #photography #WTF #UK pic.twitter.com/8mbaKoG7IN

— Actuphoto.com (@actuphoto) January 6, 2017

Carol Middleton was the target of accusations that claimed she was cashing in on the royal family, starting with Prince William and Kate’s wedding. In the years following, this would pop up now and again if something she sold in her party goods online store would resemble anything royal.

Then, when Kate was pregnant with Prince George, Carol was lambasted again while being accused of cashing in on the royal baby, as reported in an archived article from Radar Online. She was a target of this criticism because her party goods included prince and princess baby party plates, which is something you see in many stores and at plenty of baby showers and christenings. Those plates have been around long before Kate got out of school, never mind having her first royal baby.

If anything, you would think that having ties to the royal family was more of a hindrance to Kate’s family business than an asset. At one point James, Kate’s younger and only brother, started a cake supply business. He sold adult joke cakes, which were nothing out of the norm or too risqué, but he was put under the microscope for that. The Sun reported that these “saucy” cakes could embarrass the royals. This was back in 2012, but they were more silly than inappropriate with sayings like, “A willy that wriggles and gives me the giggles” and “Booby-licious jiggly jugs.” Still, the backlash rolled out.

[Featured Image by KGC-178/STAR MAX/IPx/AP Images]